Intel’s Alder Lake big.little CPU design, tested: it’s a barn burner

To stick with the car comparison, let's use Mercedes C class and BMW 3 series as direct competitors, right? They offer broadly the same features, cost the same amount of money, look similar-ish, you get my point.

So now imagine that one year, BMW releases a new 3 series with revolutionary new engine that makes it go faster by few percent than the C class on average, but at the cost of double fuel consumption.

I'm sure you'd go - what are you doing BMW. You aren't Lamborghini, you aren't pushing the envelope here - you are just pushing your existing framework to the absolute max to beat the competition at a huge cost.

This isn't progress, and this isn't a bugatti veyron equivalent. This is just technological dick waving with no regard to power consumption whatsoever.

Let me make this even clearer - Intel provides two numbers this time round. One "typical" power usage, and one "peak" power usage for every 12th gen CPU. The peak on the top i9 part is 250W, and looking at the reviews that came out today, it seems correct - the CPU will consume 250W of power when running at full load.

It does though, that's the whole reason why I'm complaining. While I'm doing a video transcode on my 5900X putting all cores on full load it won't go above 140W. Do the same on the i9 and it will do it marginally faster sitting at 250W.

The point isn't complaining about 250W usage in general. Of course there are other chips, including other CPUs that use that much or more and it's not the end of the world. The problem here is that you're paying a HUGE price for a very minor advantage over the competition or even their own chips. If you clearly can buy a chip that performs very slightly worse for over 100W reduction in power, why would you buy the space heater one.

Yes overclockers have been doing this literally forever, I'm aware, but this is intel making this decision on stock CPU - I just don't find this acceptable at all.

>> I don't understand this sudden concern about Intel shipping CPUs with high peak TDP.

To summarize the above - because clearly the high peak TDP is much higher than that of competing CPUs for a very minor increase in performance. That's just not ok.

The Ryzen temperature spikes are a well-known phenomenon: https://www.google.com/search?q=ryzen+temperature+spikes

In my experience with a 5600X and water cooling (nothing crazy, just an off the shelf AIO) sustained full CPU load will be in the 70s, but I've seen it hit 80 or so briefly.

Most tech products that are the tip of the spear are bad value for money and less energy efficient than the ones down the range (Nvidia 3090 vs 3080 for example) as they pass the point of diminishing returns of what the design can do and what's cheap and easy to manufacture.

But they exist because there is a marke of enthusiasts for whom efficiency or price does not matter, they just want the best performance money can buy because maybe their business use case benefits from the 10% shorter render/compile times at the cost of 50% extra power consumption. Who are you to judge?

It's still overclocking.

PBO will drive a 5950X to something like 310W in some applications.

The test was perfectly fair because they used the CPU as delivered, as the average user would use it.

Nobody is buying these CPUs to overclock them to a specific power usage. They're either running them stock or running them at whatever comfortable overclock they can get away with.

Test stock versus stock and overclocked versus overclocked. Trying to normalize to specific power consumption doesn't make sense for enthusiast builds.

Who do you recommend this CPU to?

Harming the compaby that was fines billions for market manipukation against AMD?

The drowning out discussion noise seems to be much more of the macho-tribal variety of shallow assumptions and absolutist conclusions.

And that’s really too bad, because I do really enjoy conversations framed in honest wondering and non-biased estimation of the future potential of various architectures.

The only thing all of us get out of this is: context matters.

I never make the claim it scale linearly. And I have been very explicit in the node simply because I expect technical reader should know it doesn't scale linearly ( may be I should have wrote it down just in case ) and as I wrote in my another reply you cant even use the TSMC N5 and scale to 5+Ghz. It is not optimised nor tested for that clock speed.

To make the comparison on a low power node, Alderlake using 5W at 3.2Ghz, and scale linearly with GB5 score, it would get a result of 1140. On the same power, M1 is able to score 50% higher. Or 50% increase in IPC.

But that comparison in my view is unfair if not truly misleading. Because there are a lot of assumption involved, from scaling to design and performance characteristics. Where as the previous comparison was done with two actual product based on facts, and you should draw your own conclusion within the context.

You can't trust these publications at all anymore.

Intel's 10nm is relatively close to TSMC's 7nm in term of density. That's why Intel renamed it to "Intel 7".

Technically, even TSMC calls it N7, and not 7nm.

But as you said, those units are more or less meaningless. Its just marketing.

All of this is SDRAM, the S stands for synchronous and means that the memory is driven according to fixed timings in relation to a fixed bus clock. All LPDDR4X-4266 parts with the same timings perform exactly the same, whether they are soldered to the interposer or are 5 cm away on the board.

Marketing brags about memory bandwidth based on clockspeed * bus width = 400GB/sec. Getting 60% of peak on some memory bandwidth benchmark is pretty common. Try McCalpin's stream benchmark on your platform of choice to verify. I suspect you'll find similar on Intel or AMD on desktops, laptops, or servers.

Not sure I buy the memory bound argument, sure peak performance will not change, but worst case performance can be caused by cache misses. So I expect that the new MBPs will be more evenly fast than the x86-64 competition, even while doing stressful things. I don't currently need a $3k laptop, but am hoping they ship a mini with a M1 Max or Pro.

To quote anandtech: The fp2017 suite has more workloads that are more memory-bound, and it’s here where the M1 Max is absolutely absurd. The workloads that put the most memory pressure and stress the DRAM the most, such as 503.bwaves, 519.lbm, 549.fotonik3d and 554.roms, have all multiple factors of performance advantages compared to the best Intel and AMD have to offer.

So an apple M1 Max is 19% faster on SpecFP (floating point applications) as a Ryzen 5950x which has twice as many fast cores (16 vs 8) and runs at 105 watts TDP. That's pretty amazing in my book.

You can also buy RISCV if you want something more open and not ARM.

You can already get a usable desktop on an M1 Mac, if you really want to. The CPU is fast enough that you don't absolutely need graphics acceleration, and Wifi, USB, and display output all work.

The big missing piece is the GPU, but Alyssa has a fully-custom user-space implementation for macOS that largely works.

Where is it $589? Its sold for $1,426.45 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09FXDLX95 and the 5950X is $749 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0815Y8J9N/ so the Intel is much more expensive in the real word than MSRP and the AMD is slightly cheaper.

However DDR5 doubles the number of channels vs DDR4, while also having a higher clock rate (more bandwidth), so it's a bigger difference.

[0] https://twitter.com/iancutress/status/1401834748402716672

See Zen 2. Zen 3. The desktop chips are very efficient. When you throw 105W at them, they compete at the very top of the desktop performance market. Previous to this Alder Lake release, they were beating much more power hungry Intel chips. Now they remain competitive at half the power.

Cut them down to 15W-45W chips, and they work great in laptops, with ample performance and excellent battery life.

If Intel has massively more efficient chip designs that they plan to use in mobile, why aren't they making use of them? They could have competitive performance without doubling the power consumption.

It's a similar story with Apple Silicon. They have chips that can do amazing things at 10W. Crank 60W through them and they are excellent performers.

If you have no choice but to consume massive amounts of power to get top performance, so be it. But given the choice...

The argument is made that in the same budget (die/power/heat) of a performance core you can fit multiple efficiency cores to help with threaded workloads, but this Intel CPU uses even more power, so wouldn't they have been better off with 100% performance cores on an "enthusiast" chip?

It’s all state in a machine, and ML is showing us recursion + memory accomplish a lot; why all the generic structure in x86 if we can prove our substrate works just as well with better power efficiency if it’s structured specifically?

Chips aren’t concepts, they’re coupled to physics; simplify the real geometry. I think that’s what Apple is really proving with its chips, and why Intel is trying to become a foundry; they realize their culture can only extend x86 and x86 comes from another era of manufacturing.

I got into tech designing telecom hardware for mass production in the late-90 and early-00s. I just code now but still follow manufacturing, and have friends that work in fabs all over; this is just sort of a summary of the trends we see shrug emoji

I have written my own ECS loops, rendering pipelines; all naive but after that it’s optimizing to product fit, and product emotional themes are pretty copy-paste to satisfy social memes.

I think this applies to other fields, too. Watch your umptieth Super Bowl, and chances are you will think back to the ‘better’ one you saw when you were young. Twenty years from now, the kids watching their first one now will say the same about this one.

While there aren't any nefarious intentions on behalf of the reviewer, this approach runs into the following problems:

- People buying high-end GPUs are unlikely to be running at resolutions of 1080p or below (or at lower quality settings), and won't see as much (if any) performance difference between CPUs as what reviewers show.

- People buying lower-end GPUs are going to be GPU-bottlenecked, and won't see as much (if any) performance difference between CPUs as what reviewers show.

- Each frame being rendered needs to be set up, animated, sent to the GPU for display, etc., and like all workloads, there's going to be portions that can't be effectively parallelized. As such, the higher the frame rate, the more likely the game is to be bottlenecked by single-threaded performance, which is an area where Intel CPUs have traditionally been strong relative to AMD's. However, as frames get more complex and take longer to render, the CPU has more of an opportunity to perform that work in parallel, and raw computational throughput is an area where AMD's modern CPUs have been strong relative to Intel's. So just because a CPU has leading performance in games today, doesn't necessarily mean that will hold in the future as game worlds become more complex (and reviewers revisiting the performance of 2017-era AMD Zen 1 vs. Intel Kaby Lake in recently-released titles have already started seeing this).

In short, the way that reviewers test CPU performance in games results in the tests being artificial and not really reflective of what most end users would actually experience.

After all, a graph showing nearly identical CPU performance across the lineup and the reviewer concluding, "yep, still GPU-limited," doesn't make for an interesting article/video.

They finally have some (nonstandard) Wayland support, after the standards were set and they had every chance to make changes, and its shitty that their open source linux drivers are locked at a low clock unless you have an old GPU. Horrible Linux experience, Linus needs to flip them off again. Its not bad with the propietary drivers, and its unfortunately the only way to run a CUDA for ML.

Then I buy my AMD and deal with their weird driver issues and throw my hands up.